THE ORIGIN OF NEGRO SLAVERY

THE ORIGIN OF NEGRO SLAVERY

WHEN IN 1492 COLUMBUS, representing the Spanish monarchy, discovered the New World, he set in train the long and bitter international rivalry over colonial possessions for which, after four and a half centuries, no solution has yet been found. Portu- gal, which had initiated the movement of international expan- sion, claimed the new territories on the ground that they fell within the scope of a papal bull of 1455 authorizing her to re- duce to servitude all infidel peoples. The two powers, to avoid controversy, sought arbitration and, as Catholics, turned to the Pope a natural and logical step in an age when the universal claims of the Papacy were still unchallenged by individuals and governments. After carefully sifting the rival claims, the Pope issued in 1493 a series of papal bulls which established a line of demarcation between the colonial possessions of the two states: the East went to Portugal and the West to Spain. The partition, however, failed to satisfy Portuguese aspirations and in the sub- sequent year the contending parties reached a more satisfactory compromise in the Treaty of Tordesillas, which rectified the papal judgment to permit Portuguese ownership of Brazil.
Neither the papal arbitration nor the formal treaty was in- tended to be binding on other powers, and both were in fact repudiated. Cabot's voyage to North America in 1497 was Eng-
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land's immediate reply to the partition. Francis I of France voiced his celebrated protest: "The sun shines for me as for others. I should very much like to see the clause in Adam's will that excludes me from a share of the world." The king of Denmark refused to accept the Pope's ruling as far as the East Indies were concerned. Sir William Cecil, the famous Elizabe- than statesman, denied the Pope's right "to give and take king- doms to whomsoever he pleased." In 1580 the English govern- ment countered with the principle of effective occupation as the determinant of sovereignty. 1 Thereafter, in the parlance of the day, there was "no peace below the line." It was a dispute, in the words of a later governor of Barbados, as to "whether the King of England or of France shall be monarch of the West Indies, for the King of Spain cannot hold it long. . . ." 2 Eng- land, France, and even Holland, began to challenge the Iberian Axis and claim their place in the sun. The Negro, too, was to have his place, though he did not ask for it: it was the broiling sun of the sugar, tobacco and cotton plantations of the New World.
According to Adam Smith, the prosperity of a new colony depends upon one simple economic factor "plenty of good land." 3 The British colonial possessions up to 1776, however, can broadly be divided into two types. The first is the self-sufficient and diversified economy of small farmers, "mere earth- scratchers" as Gibbon Wakefield derisively called them, 4 living on a soil which, as Canada was described in 1840, was "no lot- tery, with a few exorbitant prizes and a large number of blanks, but a secure and certain investment." 5 The second type is the colony which has facilities for the production of staple articles on a large scale for an export market. In the first cate- gory fell the Northern colonies of the American mainland; in the second, the mainland tobacco colonies and the sugar islands of the Caribbean. In colonies of the latter type, as Merivale pointed out, land and capital were both useless unless labor could be commanded. 6 Labor, that is, must be constant and must work, or be made to work, in co-operation. In such colonies the rugged individualism of the Massachusetts farmer,
ORIGIN OF NEGRO SLAVERY 5
practising his intensive agriculture and wringing by the sweat of his brow niggardly returns from a grudging soil, must yield to the disciplined gang of the big capitalist practising exten- sive agriculture and producing on a large scale. Without this compulsion, the laborer would otherwise exercise his natural inclination to work his own land and toil on his own account. The story is frequently told of the great English capitalist, Mr. Peel, who took 50,000 and three hundred laborers with him to the Swan River colony in Australia. His plan was that his laborers would work for him, as in the old country. Arrived in Australia, however, where land was plentiful too plentiful the laborers preferred to work for themselves as small proprietors, rather than under the capitalist for wages. Austra- lia was not England, and the capitalist was left without a serv- ant to make his bed or fetch him water. 7
For the Caribbean colonies the solution for this dispersion and "earth-scratching" was slavery. The lesson of the early history of Georgia is instructive. Prohibited from employing slave labor by trustees who, in some instances, themselves owned slaves in other colonies, the Georgian planters found them- selves in the position, as Whitefield phrased it, of pepple whose legs were tied and were told to walk. So the Georgia magistrates drank toasts "to the one thing needful" slavery until the ban was lifted. 8 "Odious resource" though it might be, as Merivale called it, 9 slavery was an economic institution of the first im- portance. It had been the basis of Greek economy and had built up the Roman Empire. In modern times it provided the sugar for the tea and the coffee cups of the Western world. It pro- duced the cotton to serve as a base for modern capitalism. It made the American South and the Caribbean islands. Seen in historical perspective, it forms a part of that general picture of the harsh treatment of the underprivileged classes, the unsympa- thetic poor laws and severe feudal laws, and the indifference with which the rising capitalist class was "beginning to reckon prosperity in terms of pounds sterling, and . . . becoming used to the idea of sacrificing human life to the deity of increased production." 10
Adam Smith, the intellectual champion of the industrial mid-
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die class with its new-found doctrine of freedom, later propa- gated the argument that it was, in general, pride and love of power in the master that led to slavery and that, in those countries where slaves were employed, free labor would be more profitable. Universal experience demonstrated con- clusively that "the work done by slaves, though it appears to cost only their maintenance, is in the end the dearest of any. A person who can acquire no property can have no other in- terest than to eat as much, and to labour as little as possible." 11
Adam Smith thereby treated as an abstract proposition what is a specific question of time, place, labor and soil. The eco- nomic superiority of free hired labor over slave is obvious even to the slave owner. Slave labor is given reluctantly, it is un- skilful, it lacks versatility. 12 Other things being equal, free men would be preferred. But in the early stages of colonial devel- opment, other things are not equal. When slavery is adopted, it is not adopted as the choice over free labor; there is no choice at all. The reasons for slavery, wrote Gibbon Wakefield, "are not moral, but economical circumstances; they relate not to vice and virtue, but to production." 13 With the limited popu- lation of Europe in the sixteenth century, the free laborers necessary to cultivate the staple crops of sugar, tobacco and cotton in the New World could not have been supplied in quantities adequate to permit large-scale production. Slavery was necessary for this, and to get slaves the Europeans turned first to the aborigines and then to Africa.
Under certain circumstances slavery has some obvious ad- vantages. In the cultivation of crops like sugar, cotton and tobacco, where the cost of production is appreciably reduced on larger units, the slaveowner, with his large-scale produc- tion and his organized slave gang, can make more profitable use of the land than the small farmer or peasant proprietor. For such staple crops, the vast profits can well stand the greater expense of inefficient slave labor. 14 Where all the knowledge required is simple and a matter of routine, constancy and co- operation in labor slavery is essential, until, by importation of new recruits and breeding, the population has reached the point of density and the land available for appropriation has
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been already apportioned. When that stage is reached, and only then, the expenses of slavery, in the form of the cost and maintenance of slaves, productive and unproductive, exceed the cost of hired laborers. As Merivale wrote: "Slave labour is dearer than free wherever abundance of free labour can be procured" 15
From the standpoint of the grower, the greatest defect of slavery lies in the fact that it quickly exhausts the soil. The labor supply of low social status, docile and cheap, can be maintained in subjection only by systematic degradation and by deliberate efforts to suppress its intelligence. Rotation of crops and scientific farming are therefore alien to slave societies. As Jefferson wrote of Virginia, "we can buy an acre of new land cheaper than we can manure an old one." 16 The slave planter, in the picturesque nomenclature of the South, is a "land-killer." This serious defect of slavery can be counter- balanced and postponed for a time if fertile soil is practically unlimited. Expansion is a necessity of slave societies; the slave power requires ever fresh conquests. 17 "It is more profitable," wrote Merivale, "to cultivate a fresh soil by the dear labour of slaves, than an exhausted one by the cheap labour of free- men." 18 From Virginia and Maryland to Carolina, Georgia, Texas and the Middle West; from Barbados to Jamaica to Saint Domingue and then to Cuba; the logic was inexorable and the same. It was a relay race; the first to start passed the baton, unwillingly we may be sure, to another and then limped sadly behind.
Slavery in the Caribbean has been too narrowly identified with the Negro. A racial twist has thereby been given to what is basically an economic phenomenon. Slavery was not born of racism: rather, racism was the consequence of slavery. Unfree labor in the New World was brown, white, black, and yellow; Catholic, Protestant and pagan.
The first instance of slave trading and slave labor developed in the New World involved, racially, not the Negro but the Indian. The Indians rapidly succumbed to the excessive labor demanded of them, the insufficient diet, the white man's dis-
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eases, and their inability to adjust themselves to the new way of life. Accustomed to a life of liberty, their constitution and temperament were ill-adapted to the rigors of plantation slavery. As Fernando Ortiz writes: "To subject the Indian to the mines, to their monotonous, insane and severe labor, with- out tribal sense, without religious ritual, . . . was like taking away from him the meaning of his life. ... It was to enslave not only his muscles but also his collective spirit." 19
The visitor to Ciudad Trujillo, capital of the Dominican Re- public (the present-day name of half of the island formerly called Hispaniola), will see a statue of Columbus, with the figure of an Indian woman gratefully writing (so reads the caption) the name of the Discoverer. The story is told, on the other hand, of the Indian chieftain, Hatuey, who, doomed to die for resisting the invaders, staunchly refused to accept the Christian faith as the gateway to salvation when he learned that his executioners, too, hoped to get to Heaven. It is far more probable that Hatuey, rather than the anonymous woman, represented contemporary Indian opinion of their new over- lords.
England and France, in their colonies, followed the Spanish practice of enslavement of the Indians. There was one con- spicuous difference the attempts of the Spanish Crown, how- ever ineffective, to restrict Indian slavery to those who re- fused to accept Christianity and to the warlike Caribs on the specious plea that they were cannibals. From the standpoint of the British government Indian slavery, unlike later Negro slavery which involved vital imperial interests, was a purely colonial matter. As Lauber writes: "The home government was interested in colonial slave conditions and legislation only when the African slave trade was involved. . . . Since it (Indian slavery) was never sufficiently extensive to interfere with Negro slavery and the slave trade, it never received any at- tention from the home government, and so existed as legal be- cause never declared illegal." 20
But Indian slavery never was extensive in the British do- minions. Ballagh, writing of Virginia, says that popular senti- ment had never "demanded the subjection of the Indian race
ORIGIN OF NEGRO SLAVERY 9
per se, as was practically the case with the Negro in the first slave act of 1661, but only of a portion of it, and that admittedly a very small portion. ... In the case of the Indian . . . slavery was viewed as of an occasional nature, a preventive penalty and not as a normal and permanent condition." 21 In the New England colonies Indian slavery was unprofitable, for slavery of any kind was unprofitable because it was unsuited to the di- versified agriculture of these colonies. In addition the Indian slave was inefficient. The Spaniards discovered that one Negro was worth four Indians. 22 A prominent official in Hispaniola in- sisted in 1518 that "permission be given to bring Negroes, a race robust for labor, instead of natives, so weak that they can only be employed in tasks requiring little endurance, such as taking care of maize fields or farms." 23 The future staples of the New World, sugar and cotton, required strength which the Indian lacked, and demanded the robust "cotton nigger" as sugar's need of strong mules produced in Louisiana the epithet "sugar mules." According to Lauber, "When compared with sums paid for Negroes at the same time and place the prices of Indian slaves are found to have been considerably lower." 24
The Indian reservoir, too, was limited, the African inex- haustible. Negroes therefore were stolen in Africa to work the lands stolen from the Indians in America. The voyages of Prince Henry the Navigator complemented those of Columbus, West African history became the complement of West Indian.
The immediate successor of the Indian, however, was not the Negro but the poor white. These white servants included a variety of types. Some were indentured servants, so called be- cause, before departure from the homeland, they had signed a contract, indented by law, binding them to service for a stipu- lated time in return for their passage. Still others, known as "redemptioners," arranged with the captain of the ship to pay for their passage on arrival or within a specified time there- after; if they did not, they were sold by the captain to the highest bidder. Others were convicts, sent out by the deliberate policy of the home government, to serve for a specified period.
This emigration was in tune with mercantilist theories of the
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day which strongly advocated putting the poor to industrious and useful labor and favored emigration, voluntary or involun- tary, as relieving the poor rates and finding more profitable occupations abroad for idlers and vagrants at home. "Inden- tured servitude," writes C. M. Haar, "was called into existence by two different though complementary forces: there was both a positive attraction from the New World and a negative re- pulsion from the Old." 25 In a state paper delivered to James I in 1606 Bacon emphasized that by emigration England would gain "a double commodity, in the avoidance of people here, and in making use of them there." 26
This temporary service at the outset denoted no inferiority or degradation. Many of the servants were manorial tenants fleeing from the irksome restrictions of feudalism, Irishmen seeking freedom from the oppression of landlords and bishops, Germans running away from the devastation of the Thirty Years' War. They transplanted in their hearts a burning desire for land, an ardent passion for independence. They came to the land of opportunity to be free men, their imaginations power- fully wrought upon by glowing and extravagant descriptions in the home country. 27 It was only later when, in the words of Dr. Williamson, "all ideals of a decent colonial society, of a better and greater England overseas, were swamped in the pursuit of an immediate gain," 28 that the introduction of dis- reputable elements became a general feature of indentured service.
A regular traffic developed in these indentured servants. Be- tween 1654 and 1685 ten thousand sailed from Bristol alone, chiefly for the West Indies and Virginia. 29 In 1683 white serv- ants represented one-sixth of Virginia's population. Two-thirds of the immigrants to Pennsylvania during the eighteenth cen- tury were white servants; in four years 25,000 came to Phila- delphia alone. It has been estimated that more than a quarter of a million persons were of this class during the colonial period, 80 and that they probably constituted one-half of all English immigrants, the majority going to the middle colonies